Years ago, clicking through the remote in the wee hours, I stumbled upon cable rebroadcast of a 1950s-era sitcom. Starved for vapidity, I settled my butt on the couch and watched. The show wasn’t Leave It To Beaver but, depicting the lighthearted adventures of a middle-class family, its dynamics were similar. In this particular episode, the family’s precocious son mistakenly believes a neighbor lost his job. When the neighbor sends the family television set out for repairs, the boy thinks it has been repossessed. The boy tells his family, tells other neighbors. At first, people want to help the neighbor, provide him job leads, and maybe bake a casserole so his family can enjoy a hot meal despite their diminished circumstances, but when they track him down on a Saturday morning, they become incensed: the deadbeat ne’er-do-well is golfing! Why isn’t he out pounding the pavement looking for work? Why is he squandering his remaining cash on greens fees? Of course, the ha-ha moment comes when it’s revealed that reports of the neighbor’s pink slip are greatly exaggerated. He remains gainfully employed! In fact, he’s thriving! And that precocious boy? He’s just so damn cute and lovable that everyone laughs off his ugly allegations of impeding penury doom and embraces him in one big warm fuzzy. But me? I shuddered. One needn’t be cynical to imagine the confrontation had that man really lost his job. The worst aspects of Eisenhower-era conformity would be imposed on him. Harangued and shamed, he’d be made to feel like a reprobate. Should he remain jobless, he would be shunned, for ostracism was the exclusionary tool of choice that kept WASP-ish communities lilywhite, god-fearing, respectfully Republican, and free of the destabilizing threat of radical Otherness. Increasingly, a New Ostracism is emerging that uses “virtual” medias to bring social shame and exclusion on individuals in the larger “real” world. Un scandale recently hit the alt-lit writing community when a popular poet was accused of being a serial abuser of women. A spontaneous online campaign against the poet, aimed at disrupting his professional standing, brought success: publishers pulled his titles from their catalogs. Last month, allegations against others in the alt-lit community were made. An editor and a fairly well-known indie novelist were outed as also being serial abusers of women. The outrage seems to be taking a similar path.Other examples of “The New Ostracism” abound. Community activists use sex offender registries to hound down and harass neighborhood offenders in hopes of driving them away. “Bad boyfriend” sites invite women to write-up abusive or cheating boyfriends so other women might be spared the agony of a relationship with them. Whereas old-school ostracism sought to ignore or exclude their targets (as William James aptly described the phenomena, victims are made to feel as if they’ve been “cut dead”), the precipitating online acts against New Ostracism victims do the opposite: publishing addresses of sex offenders and blogs about how that person physically abuses lovers are acts of recognition. Yet the intent behind these very public acts is to deprive victims of the dignity that comes from having a sense of communal belonging and social companionship. When the target is a poet whose social and professional circles, presumably, are filled with people who like to believe they have a social conscience, New Ostracism can be very successful.But how about other circumstances?Consider the case of Ray Rice. Earlier this year, a video of the All-Pro running back punching out his then-fiancée surfaced on TMZ. Football fans may not be particularly PC, yet the reaction was swift: Rice was released by the Baltimore Ravens, his club, and indefinitely suspended by the NFL. So embarrassed were the Ravens by their association with the player that they took the near-unprecedented step of offering to exchange whatever Ray Rice jerseys fans purchased for jerseys of other Ravens players; so embarrassed were Rice’s former fans by his actions that almost 8,000 took the team up on this offer.Can ostracism, which traditionally has been employed to preserve status quo hegemonies, be used to help enforce positive social change? The answer is messy. Attempts to curb domestic violence are noble, but on the internet, a medium where hoaxes and scams are not unknown, undocumented allegations bandied by specious and/or anonymous parties quickly take on the vigilante appearance of a witch hunt. Stoking outrage and courting invective, New Ostracism rides a wild unpredictable path. The campaign against the poet? Before it snowballed into a putsch to derail his career, it began as a plea not to support a crowdfunding campaign to pay for his OCD therapy.And yet, sometimes witch hunts lead to actual witches. Jian Ghomeshi, the wildly popular CBC talk show host was recently let go by that network following a wave of sexual assault allegations. If the allegations are true, the man is a beast whom we should all choose not to associate with. Through New Ostracism incidents like this, society is hopefully, if gradually, being transformed. After the Ray Rice scandal broke, the former General Manager of another NFL franchise said that the league had systematically hushed “hundreds and hundreds” of domestic abuse allegations during his 30 year career. Given the Ray Rice backlash, one suspects the NFL will not be so quick to cover-up domestic violence allegations in the future.Which brings me back to the poet. His name is Gregory Sherl. Although small independent poetry presses have largely washed their hands of him, his debut novel was published earlier this year by a larger commercial press. This month, Oprah.com features it as one of their “recommended” reads.Oprah? Giving support to an alleged creep? It makes no sense, does it?It’s incredibly easy to write articles bemoaning the bad behavior of others when that bad behavior has no direct connection to your life. Outrage is easy when you don’t risk anything by expressing it. This past week, we’ve all read reports about the woman who was catcalled a gazillion times while strolling through Manhattan. A story like that gets a lot of buzz because a) it’s so shocking, and, b) catcalling is indefensible. No one risks being made to feel out-of-touch if they write about what a horrible injustice that woman has been made to feel.But to out a fellow writer?Because the alt-lit and MFA worlds are relatively small, and because I suspect most people who frequent my blog are part of the alt-lit and MFA communities, I suspect a lot of people reading this will be at least somewhat familiar with Gregory Sherl. As you probably guessed from the title of this blog post, people are petitioning Oprah to drop the book from her lists. I admit it: when I first saw the petition, I was conflicted. As a would-be novelist myself who would love to be published by a larger commercial press (and would be overjoyed if Oprah fell in love with that novel), my first thought is that I should stay clear of this petition, that I shouldn’t rock the boat. Why would I, a would-be novelist, want to do anything to put me at risk of being labeled as a trouble-maker within publishing circles?Because I have children.I’ve done some digging. As near as I can tell, at least 5 women have come out with very troubling and very similar stories of abuse. Here are a couple of them: one and two. Please be advised that these are not for the faint of heart.

As essayist and novelist Roxane Gay (BAD FEMINIST, AN UNNAMED STATE) commented on the HTLM GIANT blog piece that first raised allegations against Sherl, “I was taken aback by the original post, because I've known Greg Sherl for years and in fact, blurbed his novel last week, which feels quite uncomfortable now. Witch hunts serve no one's best interests but this doesn't feel like a witch hunt. I hope Sherl gets the help he clearly needs but I'm not going to doubt victims or belittle them, or get cute with cherry picking their statements to make some kind of vague point, as you have done.”If these are true, Gregory Sherl is as a bad monster as Ray Rice and Jian Ghomeshi are alleged to be. I swear, hearing stories like this keeps me up at night. I’ve got three children: two boys (ages 13 & 15), and a nine-year-old little girl. My daughter is incredibly bright (she scores off the charts on logic, reasoning, and problem-solving tests) but she also has a learning disability that affects her self-confidence. I worry about her. Actually, I worry about all my children: it’s part of being a parent, no? I worry about what might happen if, some day, my daughter falls prey to a sexual predator, a spousal abuser, a creep like any of the men I’ve written about above are alleged to be. I wouldn’t be able to control my anger. I’d probably do something incredibly wrong-headed, like attempt to take-out my anger on whatever jerk was doing my daughter wrong. I can only imagine how I’d feel if that creep was allowed to thrive because people refused to sign a petition that would bring his horrible behavior to the light of others. I’d be mad at those who didn’t sign that petition. And I’d be mad at me if I didn’t sign it too.Please consider signing the petition. We need to change the world so that domestic violence and sexual abuse are things of the past. The actions we take today have an effect on all our lives for years to come. We’ll be protecting our daughters, our sisters, our nieces, our friends, and all their grandchildren. Abuse of any kind should not be tolerated.

Addendum: I just realized that Mr. Sherl's publisher, Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill, are also the publishers of the finest novel I've read so far this year: Amy Rowland's THE TRANSCRIPTIONIST (click here for my review of THE TRANSCRIPTIONIST). I feel bad for them: alleged creeps can, apparently, pop up in the best of houses.

When I was in high school, my best friend took an elective “television” class. This was in the ‘80s, and back then, I gave him grief. You’re taking a television class? What? Can‘t you get into Basket Weaving? But my friend stood his ground, asserting the class was intellectually valid.Chuck Holtz, a social studies teacher who also coached most of the boys’ sports teams at our school, taught the course.“What’s the difference between film and television?” Holtz asked on the first day of class.People squirmed in their seats. These were high school students who never really thought about the matter. To them, both were just forms of visually-driven narratives. Someone said that the soundtracks were better in movies. Someone else said that TV shows were generally shorter than movies.As my friend told this story, I pictured a pained expression coming over Holtz. Much as the class tried, they couldn’t identify more than superficial differences. Our school had pitiful basketball and football teams, teams so bad they had trouble executing the simplest plays. Now he was finding out his kids couldn’t even do television right. If he had a whistle around his neck, he probably would have blown it on the spot and made everyone run five laps around the classroom. Finally, Holtz answered his own question: Television shows were built to keep advertisers happy, while movies were built to generate ticket sales. Looking back, I doubt this was an original thought—but as a naïve high school junior, this staggered me. Commercial television, he said, was purposefully bland so as to not offend advertisers’ sensibilities. Films couldn’t afford to be bland, since from the moment of their conception (Hey! Johnny Depp as The Mad Hatter!) they must generate hype to guarantee a paying audience.Like I said, this was back in the early ‘80s, before the full impact of cable TV was felt. And before Hollywood movie producers learned to make money off product placement deals. So we can argue whether the point is still valid today. But Holtz’s point was that film and television producers knowingly crafted their end products in different ways to suit their different revenue sources; where the money came from determined both the content and governing aesthetic of the art form. Today, most literary journals are not reader-dependent for their funding. Instead, they perform as prestige projects—deriving their income either from academic institutions, or wealthy patrons; in many cases, the editors themselves foot the costs. Subscriptions and advertising may supplement the journals’ finances, but rare is the journal that is solely dependant on these traditional market-driven forces.Unencumbered by audience or advertiser accountability, journals seem to exist to make their editors happy. The editors select stories that they personally find most satisfying—they want to be seen as promoting hip new work, or traditional realistic work, or whatever other social and/or aesthetic predilections they have. But the editors are largely putting out a product to satisfy their personal aesthetic missions.Universities and regional arts’ councils alike are cutting back support for literary journals, leaving them scrambling to locate new sources of funding. Some journals, like The New England Review, have been told by their host institutions that they must become financially self-sustaining. Others, like Shenandoah and TriQuarterly, are slashing costs by abandoning print and becoming electronic journals. One Story has been most innovative, initiating a series of workshop and mentoring programs, as well as hosting a “Literary Debutante Ball” fundraiser. Increasingly however, journals are opting to meet this funding crisis by charging submission fees—that is, demanding payment from writers who wish to have their work considered for publication. In most cases, the fees charged are comparable to the postage costs a writer might pay to snail-mail their work (two or three dollars), yet some magazines (like Narrative) charge substantially more.Last week, I learned through Roxane Gay’s post on HTMLGIANT (via a Robert Smartwood blog post) that Prick of the Spindle will begin requiring a $10-15 submission fee. David Lynn, editor of The Kenyon Review talked with me via email about submission fees. Like most people paying close attention to the state of literary journals, he’s deeply sympathetic to the editors and publishers who are fighting to put out quality literature, yet uneasy about submission fees.“Publishers and editors have all the highest motives. They simply want to publish the best new work available to them while maintaining the financial viability of their enterprise,” Lynn says. “At the same time, I can’t help but feel that submission fees taint the process.”Journals stand to increase revenues by several thousand dollars per year when they begin charging submission fees. The fees may end up underwriting the bulk of journals’ operating expenses—providing a handy justification for supporting institutions (whether they be universities or regional arts’ councils) to further diminish their support. While many claim the fees offset the costs associated with online submissions (the software to operate the most popular online submission manager program can cost $600), others claim that it allows them to pay more money to contributors. There’s even a thought that submission fees are necessary to discourage inappropriate submissions. Putting aside the question of whether it’s ethical to set up pay hurdles for writers, I worry about the eventual aesthetic consequences. When editors start looking at submissions as revenue-generators, it changes in a very fundamental way the function of the end-product journal.The old saw about novel writing is that the purpose of the first chapter is to entice readers to read the second chapter, while the function of the last chapter is to entice the reader to buy the writer’s next book. The function of a new issue of a literary journal, I fear, may well be to entice writers to submit to the next issue.As more journals become dependent on submission fees, they will compete against each other not only for the best stories, poems, and essays, but also for submission dollars. Websites like Duotrope.com provide writers with data about the chances of getting published in particular journals. Our nation’s most prestigious journals generally have a very low acceptance rate—this shouldn’t surprise, for they’ve built their reputations by publishing work of consistently high quality. Should submission fees become the norm, with every journal raking in $2-20 per submission, writers with limited incomes (i.e., most of us) will have to balance costs versus probability of acceptance—and in this calculus, a journal’s selectivity could be held against it. If writers perceive that the cards are stacked against them at some places, they’ll direct their pay submissions elsewhere.“A principal mission for most literary journals is to discover and support writers who are just emerging into the larger literary community, people who don't yet have academic or other forms of independent support,” Lynn writes. “Two or three dollars at a pop may not sound like much, but for those who are submitting their work as widely as possible, it can add up pretty quickly.”Emerging writers will not be the only ones juggling where to put their money. Traditionally, writers employed by academic institutions have enjoyed many advantages, one of them being that their employers often pay the postage costs of their snail-mail submissions. Should reading fees replace postage as the main cost associated with submissions, it remains unknown if colleges and universities will defray these costs for their faculty.What choices will an editorial board make when that journal’s existence is dependent on guaranteeing a large, steady stream of paying submissions? To give Duotrope-savvy submitters the illusion of having greater chances for acceptance, might journals become less selective? Or might the average length of each published short story dwindle, thus affording the journal to accept, say, 20 pieces of flash fiction instead of one 20-page short story? The aesthetic consequences of these decisions will be enormous. Think about it—who’s going to write long short stories (or novellas) anymore if their length makes them unpublishable?Journals that serve niche communities or favor out-of-the–mainstream aesthetics could find that the pool of people willing to pay to have their work considered may not be large enough to cover the costs of the journal. If this happens, journals would have to re-model their core mission to attract more submitters.For writers seeking to publish, the competition is tremendous. I keep tabs on my submissions through Duotrope, which tells me that my submission acceptance ratio over the last 12 months is 3.96%-- meaning I’ll have one acceptance for every 25 submissions. Which, yep, sounds pathetic—but also, according to Duotrope, “is higher than the average for users who have submitted to the same markets.”Should submission fees escalate, many of us are going to stop submitting. Really. Think of it. If journals charge Narrative-like $20 submission fees, it could cost me $500 ($20 x 25—thank god for electric calculators!) to eventually “contribute” a short story to one journal.The end result of submission fees is not good. Besides Lynn, another editor of another long-standing and highly respected journal. This editor dips quite frequently into his slush pile and laments that decreased submissions might lessen his access to the type of first-rate material he likes to publish, thus decreasing the end quality of his journal.“To think that we’d miss out on a story or poem or other submission because the writer couldn’t afford the fee or took a moral stance against fees is unfathomable to me,” the editor saidDuotrope currently lists over 3,275 fiction and poetry publications. A mass movement towards submission fees will likely cause this number to contract. I just don’t see the present community of writers as being wealthy enough keep them all afloat Editors and publishers need to begin thinking who their future writers will be. Will it be a pool of writers who have devoted their lives to studying and mastering their genres? Or just whichever folks can pony up the submission fees? And what will become of contemporary poetry and short fiction when it becomes the domain of the obscenely rich?

Please don’t misconstrue: I read flash fiction; I edit flash fiction; I occasionally write it. But I have doubts about it.During one of the “Form & Theory of Fiction” classes I took while doing my MFA, the incredibly gifted Lucinda Roy had us read SUDDEN FICTION INTERNATIONAL, a flash collection edited by Robert Shapard & James Thomas. Mid-way through reading it, I experienced a sudden sense of dissatisfaction. Individually, the stories were remarkable. Yet taken together as a forced feeding, I began to wonder whether some might work better as sections within larger works.At the time, I was experiencing a crisis of vision. The previous semester, the stories I wrote were all 30+ pages, but in that particular semester I has difficulty extending anything for more than a few pages. False starts were my specialty. I’d write what I thought were wonderfully satisfying opening sections but then not be able to “see” what the next logical step in the story might be. Who knows? Maybe I was depressed.The previous semester, in a workshop also taught by Roy, we read David Guterson’s SNOW FALLING ON CEDARS. One of our discussions focused on how a miniscule section of the novel (when Hatsue and Ishmael meet in the hollow of a cedar tree) could have been a brilliant piece of flash fiction.[Now that I think of it, the section where the girls are hiking through the forest in ZZ Packer’s “Brownies” could also work as flash fiction.]Along with psychologically destroying lovers and wives, Ernest Hemingway is famous for positing the earliest known example of proto-twitter fiction: “For Sale: Baby Shoes, never worn.”As ripe with possibilities as Hemingway’s “story” might be, I just don’t find it satisfying. At best, it’s a scenario… and as Flannery O’Connor implies, scenario ≠ story.I’ve been thinking about this today because yesterday a friend, Aubrey Hirsch, expressed that she can’t get a handle on writing stories that are less than 250 words. And I feel her pain. Micro fiction has become extremely popular. Over the summer, I was asked to write a 50-word story; try as I did, I just couldn’t do it. Recently, I came across two examples of micro-fiction that I thought were stellar:1) Len Kuntz’s “Lost” (check about halfway down the page)2) Roxane Gay’s “The Anatomy of a Good Woman”Reading these makes me very confident that I’ll never be able to produce anything as exceptional with so few words. But there’s also part of me that, as a reader, wishes the stories would extend for 10 or 20 pages. I want to be lost in a fictional world, rather than pass through one so quickly that I hardly realized I’ve traveled.So. What are you feelings about flash? Or micro? Constricted spaces used to be the strict domain of poets. Can fiction writers equipped to plough those fields?